“Stop, Paul,” she whispered.
The waitress took their order. When she went away Paul said, “It’s a simple formula. Suppose they had three hundred each of knives, forks and spoons. The odds of picking the same spoon would be three hundred to one. To pick the same spoon and fork would be ninety thousand to one. And the odds would be two million seven hundred thousand to one against getting the same set of three.”
She looked down at her hands in her lap and felt the slow burn of tears in her eyes. “You make it silly,” she said.
“I’m just going along with our program.”
“You try to make it all silly.”
“I’m trying to keep a balance. I’m not a mystic.”
“I just wanted to come here because… it’s the same place.”
“And things were dandy five years ago in here so you can walk in and find them just like they were.”
“You can’t find anything you don’t look for, Paul.”
“But don’t you feel there’s something sickly about it? A kind of plaintive sentimentality? I keep listening for the sound track. Wouldn’t they give us violins for this sequence?”
“They wouldn’t film this, the way it’s happening.”
“No, I guess they wouldn’t. Though maybe they would, come to think of it. You know. Stiff and alien with each other, all that sort of thing. Then comes the moment of realization, when eyes glow and the violins get louder.”
“Paul!”
The food was brought to them. She glanced at him as she ate. He looked far away as he ate with methodical neatness. She looked at him and wondered what had happened to them both. Five years ago this room had been a magic place. But the words and the years had turned it into a drab room filled with the sound of traffic. The food was tasteless and somebody was quarreling in the kitchen.
She told herself she was not such a fool as to expect that marriage would continue to be the breathless experience it was in the beginning. Yet a good deal more than this should be left—a good deal more than two people who used their special knowledge of each other to inflict pain. Paul seemed to have grown back into the arrogant cruelty of adolescence. She sensed his resentment of home and children and marriage. She felt that he abused her because she was the symbol of unwilling bondage.
Paul Conklin sugared his coffee and stirred it slowly. He kept his face still. He had shamed himself in spoiling even this small thing for her. But the code would not permit the expression of shame or regret. He was aware of his own compulsion.
He could look coldly back on the history of compulsion. He remembered the very first time, long ago in the dark quiet house. He had been small. There had been a quarrel, one of the worst ones. Then they had bought the train for him. A shining and fabulous train. They had set it up in a spare room. He could remember the smell of it, the spicy electrical smell. There was a station with a light inside. There was a yellow car that carried logs and dumped them when the right switch on the transformer was pulled. For the hour that it ran around and around the tracks, he had loved the train.
He took the bright cars, one by one, and put them half in and half out of the closet, next to the door frame. He jammed the heavy closet door against them, one by one. The engine had been last and most difficult. When the cars were all spoiled he had stepped on the tin station until the light went out. They shook him, hurting his arms, and took the train away. He didn’t see it again.
He remembered the strange little man who had treated him, years later, a little man with so many nervous tics and habits that he seemed mildly mad. “I can try to tell you in simple terms, Mr. Conklin. I will tell you but you will not really hear what I say. When you badly needed love you were without love. So always you have punished yourself, blaming yourself because of not being loved. The train is such an instance. And the chess that you told me about. And the music. You cannot accept any gratification without looking about for a means of destruction. It is a negativism in you. And I tell you this, sincerely, importantly. You may one day think of destroying yourself. When you think of that, stop and ask yourself why you punish yourself.”
You were a serious man, Doctor. You looked at my mental tests and you were sad about me because I represented the waste of so many things. But you were wrong, Doctor. You thought love, if I would accept it and try to give it, would cure me. It did, for a time, but it was not permanent.
Now I have Joyce. And she is the shiny train, and the bold two-bishop attack, and that duet for cello and clarinet. All the bright loved things and more than any or all of them. Inside myself I cry and reach out for her, but I show her the cold grin, and I make silly nonsense out of the things of her heart, and slowly, certainly, I drive her away. It is taking a long time because she is in love and stubborn. But I can kill anything, Doctor. Anything in the world. I was born with that wild talent, and I am very good at it. I will drive her away, kill her love. She needs a warm safe man in her house, to give stability and affection to her children. I belong in the cold places. I feel as if each day I say good-by to her a thousand times.
“Do you remember how you made the waitress laugh?” Joyce asked uncertainly, shyly.
He remembered. But the perverse demon kept him from admitting it. “Don’t tell me I tickled her. I can remember quite a few lapses of dignity, but nothing quite that basic.”
“No, it was something you said about the… well, never mind, it wouldn’t sound the least bit funny now.”
“Go ahead. Tell me.”
“I don’t want to now, Paul. You’ll just make some sort of crack about it. And you don’t really want to know.”
“I guess I should remember. I could try it on the sulky damosel we have this time. Maybe we’d all roll on the floor together, gasping.”
“Are you through?” she asked quietly. “Signal for the check. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He watched her go through the doorway toward the rest rooms. She carried herself carefully lately, as though she had become brittle. He paid the check and tipped the girl. He was standing by the door when Joyce came out. She gave him a smile he recognized. Somehow, incredibly, she had regained her resiliency. The bitter conversation was not only forgiven, it was actually forgotten. Her insane optimism seemed to him, in that moment, to be a terrifying thing. It was not believable that she was able to continue hoping that this trip would turn out right for them, mending all the rents and abrasions.
They walked across the parking lot to the maroon Plymouth. He unlocked the car and they got in.
“It’s better weather than it was that day. Remember, we ran into rain in the afternoon,” she said.
“Ah, yes. A romantic rain that continued on into the night, going pitter-patter on the motel roof while we lay locked in each other’s arms. Shouldn’t we try to whistle up a storm?”
“Do you have to be smart about that too?”
“Am I being smart? I thought I was being pretty good. I remembered the rain, didn’t I?”
“I don’t know what it is… whatever I say you make it sound as if five years ago it was all a lot of nonsense. But it wasn’t. You can’t make it nonsense by talking that way about it. I won’t let you spoil anything for us.”
He drove out into the westbound traffic. “Things should be in perspective,” he said.
“Your perspective. That’s where you want things lately, Paul. All cut down and the shine rubbed off. So that everything is just… ordinary.”
“Everything is pretty ordinary, dear, when you take a careful look at it.”
“Like love?”
“Now I don’t believe that even you would say that love is exactly an unusual state of affairs. It’s a pretty well-established reflex.”
“Reflex!”
“Of course. Continuation of the race. All that sort of thing.”
“I suppose you’ve given up believing in that too?”
“Now I have to watch myself, or you’ll throw the clincher at me. You’ll tell me I don’t believe in babies
. But before you go that far, darling, take a good steady look at the race too. Can’t you see some arguments in favor of discontinuing it?”
“I shouldn’t be serious because you’re not being serious. But you asked me. No, I see no reason to discontinue it. People are good. There’s good in the world. I believe in that.”
He was picking up speed west of town. The lane on the left was clear. He smiled ahead at the empty road. “Incorrigible optimist,” he said. “People stink. Accept that and you have a starting place.”
She did not answer. Ahead of him a blue Cadillac convertible pulled out of the center lane to pass. Paul Conklin did not reduce speed. As they passed the car in the middle lane he saw the blue car swerve right. It swung back and hit the curbing and bounced up into the center strip, but the blue tail of the car was still in his way. It was moving out of the way, but not quickly enough. He could not brake and move to the right because of the car he had just passed. The world and space and time seemed to be moving with a painful slowness. He pushed the pedal to the floor knowing that his only forlorn chance was to ease quickly through the space between the fins of the big Cad and the car on his right.
chapter 5
FORTY minutes before her violent death the girl on the back seat woke up. Frazier, who had been behind the wheel of the green Oldsmobile since midnight, saw a section of her face in the rear vision mirror when she sat up.
“I feel sick,” she announced in a puffy voice.
“You should,” Frazier said.
“Where’s Charlie?” she demanded plaintively.
“He’s right here, sleeping it up.”
She leaned forward and looked down over the back of the seat. Charlie slept with his head against the arm rest. “Oh,” she said, and leaned back. “Gee, I feel terrible. Where are we?”
“We’ll be in New York tonight some time, Lou.”
“You must a flew. Say, I forgot your name.”
“Jim.”
“Oh, sure. It was a pretty busy evening, I guess.”
“It sure was.”
When he glanced at her in the mirror again she had taken a small nylon brush out of her handbag and was brushing her young blonde hair. Daylight was not at all kind to her face. She wore a white satin off-the-shoulder blouse.
“I guess maybe this was a kind of crazy type thing,” she said.
“You and Charlie thought it was a dandy idea last night.”
“Sure, I know. But you know, drinking and all. You get all kinds of ideas when you get drinking. Big deal. Big thing. Honest, I just got what I’ve got on and that’s all and let me see here, seven, eight, twelve. Twelve bucks. Are you boys going to make sure I get back down there?”
“That’s Charlie’s problem. You’re his guest.”
“Wake him up, will you?”
“I’ll wake him up when it’s time for him to drive.”
“I got a terrible taste. Could we stop some place maybe?”
“Pretty soon.”
When he glanced at her again she was biting carefully at a Kleenex. She took it away and examined her freshly painted lips.
“I look better maybe, but gee, I feel terrible. You don’t sleep good in a back seat. My legs kept getting pins and needles. This was a crazy idea, believe me.”
“You’re only young once,” Frazier said.
“Sure. I guess so. Honest, I feel old as the hills this minute. Is there a drink or anything?”
“Look around back there. Maybe it slid under the seat. There should be some left.”
After a few moments she said, “Got it. You want any? There isn’t much left.”
“No. Go ahead.”
After a while she said, in a huskier voice, “That’s going to help. It’s nasty warm like this, but you just got to take it like medicine, I guess. Honest, I didn’t even tell my girl friend. She’ll think a maniac got me or something.”
Frazier felt a wary tension in his middle. He kept his voice casual. “Would she be likely to call the police?”
“Francie? Hell, no. We figure, Francie and me, that we each got to live our own life. If I take off, she waits until I come back. You know, we were having so much fun in that joint last night after you two came in and Charlie started talking to me that I never did find out what you boys do.”
“We’ve been on a vacation.”
“I remember you got Florida plates on the car. Is that where you’re from?”
“You can say we’re from all over, Lou.”
“I guess you’re the type doesn’t tell people much.”
“Well, you know how it is. A little vacation and you don’t like to talk about business.”
“Sure,” she said unconvincingly. “I feel a little better. If you don’t want any, I’ll finish this off.”
“Go ahead.”
After a few minutes she said, “You boys wouldn’t be in any kind of racket or anything?”
“You’ve got a lot of crazy ideas, Lou.”
“I just wondered. It would be all right with me. I mean I wouldn’t sweat any. You both sort of look like maybe you could be. Oh, not rough or anything. It’s just a look. Like I said, it wouldn’t matter. I know the score. I was waiting for a boy for a long time. He kept saying the parole would come along just about any minute and I ought to be patient and so on. But he’s still in. A girl can’t wait around forever. I didn’t mean to be bossy, asking like I did.”
“You can say we’re in the banking business,” Frazier said. He regretted saying it immediately. It was a comment a punk might make. You wanted to feel big so you swung it around. In its own way it was just as foolish as the load Charlie took on last night. Load and dim blonde.
It had been Charlie’s turn at the wheel, and they had been pushing it. He had sensed the irritability and restlessness in Charlie, and knew it would have to find an outlet soon. Charlie was fine when he was at the point of action. Cool, quick and smart. But he couldn’t hang onto that state of mind during a long run. It was nine o’clock and dark and Charlie kept inching the speedometer up over the legal limit. Each time Frazier would comment on it, Charlie would snarl, but he would drop it back. It would be a poor time and a poor place to be picked up.
They went north along a long straight stretch, swamps on either side, wooden boards rumbling on the bridges. Frazier saw town lights ahead against the sky. Ahead, on the right, he saw a brightly lighted roadside joint. It was a square building on piles, local jalopies flanked in front of the place. The neon was pink and sick green, reflecting on the beards of Spanish moss that hung from the near-by oaks. Charlie braked sharply and turned into the rutted parking area.
“This is no good,” Frazier said.
“The hell with that. I got to have a drink. What can happen here?”
“These places get checked.”
“So they get checked. Come on. You can drive from here on.”
They locked the car and walked to the place. The juke was loud. They walked through the sticky night and up the steps and into the place. There were about thirty or forty people there and they all looked at the newcomers. Frazier didn’t like the setup. These were locals. They were outsiders. If Charlie saw a woman he liked, there could be trouble. There were women at the long bar, and women in the booths. Some of their men were in sport shirts and slacks. Others were still in their work clothes. The women looked uniformly cheap, loud and drunk, the kind of women Charlie liked. Frazier preferred a different type. Quiet, clean ones, in good hotels, in good restaurants.
They found a slot at the bar and Charlie started drinking straight shots. Frazier kept on beer, to Charlie’s disgust. When Charlie left him without a word, Frazier braced himself for trouble. The two girls were in a booth. Charlie took his drink over and sat down next to the blonde in the white off-the-shoulder blouse. She was as good as anyone could find in the place. Her partner was small, round and dark. Frazier waited for two of the men to go over and try to move Charlie out. Charlie beckoned to him. He went over slowly and sat
down with his beer.
“This here is Lou and that there is Jeanie. This is Jim, girls.”
The blonde was pretty lush, but the dark one was a loud nothing. Frazier tried to relax, but he couldn’t stop worrying. They were wasting a lot of time. Charlie knocked the shots down and his eyes got that strange bright look. Charlie danced with the blonde quite a few times. Frazier danced once with the dark-headed one. He kept trying to signal to Charlie that they should be on their way, but he didn’t get anywhere. The one named Jeanie found a happier friend to dance with.
Frazier went back to the bar, nursing beer. He kept checking on Charlie and the girl. The second time Frazier came out of the men’s room, he couldn’t see Charlie or the blonde. It was nearly midnight. He looked the whole place over. He went on out to the car. Charlie and the blonde were in the back seat. He heard her laugh when he walked up to the car.
“Hey,” Charlie said. “Get in and let’s get rolling. Where you been?”
“Kiss her good-by then.”
“Hell, no! Lou is coming right along, aren’t you, darlin’?”
“Going on a trip,” the girl said solemnly, and then laughed again.
“Look, Charlie. Wait a minute.”
“Get—behind—the—wheel—and—drive,” Charlie said in an entirely different voice. Frazier knew he could do nothing with him. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad.
“Go get Jeanie,” the blonde said. “She’ll come too.”
Frazier ignored her. He got behind the wheel, started the car and headed north. The blonde complained for a while and then quieted down. He drove through the town and on into the night.
A faster car came up behind them when they were five miles beyond the town. Frazier tightened up and looked in the rear vision mirror, looking for the gleam of red spotlight. But it was a civilian car. Before it swung out to pass them, Frazier, looking in the rear vision mirror, saw that the rear window of the car was bisected by the blonde’s slim leg. For a time he was annoyed at Charlie, jealous of Charlie’s blissfully uncomplicated desires, his complete lack of fastidiousness. The blonde cried out shrilly once, and that was all.
Cry Hard, Cry Fast Page 5